a1studmuffin

I think it’s a step in the right direction, though it will be interesting to see where the boundaries are drawn. Does YouTube count? What about gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite?

The way I implemented this strategy was to make sure I had a single cigarette and lighter on me at all times. I named the cigarette, which psychologically helped prevent me from smoking it. I stuck that out for a few months until a friend smoked it in desperation. At that point I felt confident I’d quit because I wanted to, not because of random circumstance.

It’ll be interesting to see how this looks. The same technology was used in Alien: Romulus to revive a younger Ian Holm’s likeness for Rook, and while it was a cool tech demo, it still felt quite uncanny valley and distracting to watch. Casting another actor might have been a better choice. At least for this project the tech sounds more relevant, in that they’re deaging and aging characters within the same film.

I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).

I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.

Sometimes the real value of a project isn’t its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I’ve backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money’s worth on.

If you’re concerned about privacy I don’t know why you’d use Tailscale over Wireguard directly. The latter is slightly more fiddly to configure, but you only do it once and there’s no cloud middleman involved, just your devices talking directly to each other.

Nice, I hope YouTube is next.

I’m glad companies are continuing to innovate, but it feels wrong to be moving towards mechanical inventions again when we’ve finally nailed solid state tech. Have we forgotten how often printers used to break?

Horizon Zero Mean Girls

This feels relevant: https://youtu.be/A4Ncs9gXBAI

Windows App Series X Ultimate Pro for Enterprise Edition Service Pack 2

This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the “new” Metro-style Settings, then just kind of… gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can’t believe they’ve left it this long to address, it’s an awful user experience.

robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

Support local business!

I wouldn’t blame these kids for taking extreme action later in life at the regime that killed their entire family. The only sensible option here is ceasefire.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.